CHAPTER I.

LOOKING BACKWARDS.

Behold, O reader, the eastern end of the great city; a region strange beyond all measure to the dwellers in the west; a low flat marshy district, where the land and the river seem to have become entangled with each other in inextricable confusion, by reason of manifold creeks and creeklets, basins, and pools, which encroach upon the shore, and where the tall spars of mighty merchantmen and giant emigrant-ships rise cheek by jowl with factory chimneys; where the streets are dark and narrow, and the sound of engines hoarsely labouring greets the ear at every turn; where the staple commodity seems to be ship-biscuit; where the shipchandler has his stronghold; where the provision-dealer has his storehouse, in which vast hoards of dried meats and tinned provisions, pickles, and groceries are piled from floor to ceiling and from cellar to garret; a world in which the explorer stumbles unawares upon ropewalks, or finds himself suddenly involved in a cloud of bonnetless factory girls, thick as locusts in Arabia, who jibe and flout at the stranger. Roads there are, broad and airy enough, which lead away from the narrow streets and the stone basins, the quays, the docks, the steam-cranes, and tall ships—not to the country, there seems no such thing as country accessible from this peculiar world—but to distant marshes and broader water; roads fringed with dingy houses, and here and there a factory, and here and there a house of larger size and greater pretension than its neighbours, shut in by high walls perchance, and boasting an ancient garden; a garden where the tall elms were saplings in the days when kings went hunting on the Essex coast yonder; and when this east-end of London had its share of fashion and splendour.

Perhaps of all these broader thoroughfares, Shadrack-road was the shabbiest. It had struggled into existence later than the rest, and in all its dismal length could boast but one of those substantial old red-brick mansions whose occasional appearance redeemed the commonness of the other high roads. There was a sprinkling of humble shops, a seamen’s lodging-house, a terrace or two of shabby-genteel houses, three-storied, with little iron balconies that had never been painted within the memory of man; poor sordid-looking little houses, which were always putting bills in their smoke-darkened windows, beseeching people to come and lodge in them. There were a few modern villas, of the speculative-builders’ pattern, whose smart freshness put to shame their surroundings; and one of these, a corner one, with about half a perch of garden-ground, was distinguished by a red lamp and a brass-plate, on which appeared the following inscription:

MR. LUCIUS DAVOREN, _Surgeon_.

Here Lucius Davoren had begun the battle of life; actual life, in all its cold reality; hard and common and monotonous, and on occasion hopeless; a life strangely different from the explorer’s adventurous days, from the trapper’s lonely commune with nature in the trackless pine-woods; a life wherein the veriest dreamer could find scant margin for poetry; a life whose dull realities weigh down the soul of man as though an iron hand were laid upon his brain, grinding out every aspiration for better things than the day’s food and the night’s shelter.

He stands alone in the world; there is comfort at least in that. Let the struggle be sharp as it may, there is no cherished companion to share the pain. Let poverty’s stern grip pinch him never so sharply, he feels the pinch alone. Father, mother, the child sister, whom he loved so dearly fifteen years ago, are all dead. Their graves lie far away in a Hampshire churchyard, the burial-place of that rural village of which his father was Rector for thirty years of his unambitious life.

He has another sister, but she was counted lost some years ago, and to think of her is worse than to think of the dead. In all those years, from the time when he was a lad just emancipated from Winchester school to this present hour, he has never been heard to speak her name; but he keeps her in his memory nevertheless, and has the record of her hapless fate hidden away in the secret-drawer of his desk, with a picture of the face whose beauty was fatal.

She was his favourite sister, his senior by two years, fond and proud of him, his counsellor and ally in all things; like himself, passionately fond of music; like himself a born musician. This charm, in conjunction with her beauty, had made her the glory and delight of a small provincial circle, which widened before her influence. Wykhamston society was the narrowest and stiffest of systems; but the fame of Janet Davoren’s beauty and Janet Davoren’s voice travelled beyond the bounds of Wykhamston society. In a word, Miss Davoren was taken notice of by the county. The meek old Rector, with his pleasant face, and bald head scantily garnished with iron-gray hair, was made to emerge from retirement, in order to gratify the county. He was bidden to a ball at the Marquis of Guildford’s; to a private concert at Sir Horatio and Lady Veering Baker’s; to dinners and evening parties twenty miles away from the modest Rectory. Miss Davoren was even invited to stay at Lady Baker’s; and, going ostensibly for a few days, remained her ladyship’s guest for nearly a month. They were all so fond of the dear girl, Lady Baker informed the Rector.

‘_I_ am not good enough, I suppose,’ said Mrs. Davoren, when the Marchioness and the Baronet’s wife, after calling upon her, and being intensely civil for fifteen minutes, ignored her in their cards of invitation. ‘Never mind, Stephen, if you and Janet enjoy yourselves, I’m satisfied; and it’s lucky they haven’t invited me, for I’ve nothing to wear but my old black satin and the Indian scarf, and _they’d_ never do for the Castle or Lady Veering Baker’s. They’re well enough in Wykhamston, where people are accustomed to them.’

So the Rector’s worthy wife, who had supreme control of the family purse, arrayed her handsome daughter in the prettiest dresses the Wykhamston milliner could achieve, and ornamented the girl’s dark hair with camelias from the little greenhouse, and was content to sit at home and wonder what the grand Castle folks thought of her Janet, and whether her dear old man was having an agreeable rubber; content to sit up late into the night, while the rectory handmaidens snored in their attic chambers, till the creaky old covered wagonette brought home the revellers, when she would sit up yet another hour to hear the tidings of her darling’s triumphs; what songs she had sung, what dances she had danced, and all the gracious things that had been said of her and to her.

About this time, the idea that Miss Davoren was destined to make a splendid marriage became a fixed belief in the minds of the Rector’s family, from the head thereof to the very cook who cooked the dinner, always excepting the young lady herself, who seemed to take very little thought of anything but music; the organ which she played in the old church; the old-fashioned square piano in the rectory drawing-room. It did not seem possible to the simple mind of Mrs. Davoren that all this admiration could result in nothing; that her daughter could be the cynosure of every eye at Guildford Castle, the acknowledged belle at Lady Veering Baker’s musical evenings, and yet remain plain Janet Davoren, or be reduced to the necessity of marrying a curate or a struggling country surgeon. Something must come of all this patronage, which had kindled the fire of jealousy in many a Wykhamston breast. But when the fond mother ventured to suggest as much to the girl herself, she was put off with affectionate reproof.

‘Dearest mother, can you be so innocent as not to see that all this notice means nothing more than the gratification of the moment? The Marchioness and Lady Baker had happened to hear that I sing tolerably, and as the common run of amateur music is not worth much, thought they might as well have me. It only cost the trouble of calling upon you, and pretending to be interested in your poultry and papa’s garden. If this were London, and they could get professional singers, they would not have taken even so much trouble as that about me.’

‘Never mind what the Marchioness and Lady Baker mean,’ said the mother; ‘I am not thinking of them, but of the people you meet there; the young men who pay you such compliments, and crowd round you after your songs.’

Janet laughed, almost bitterly, at this speech and at the mother’s eager look, full of anticipated triumph.

‘And who will go back to their own world and forget my existence, when they leave Hampshire,’ she said.

‘But there must be some whose attentions are more marked than others,’ urged Mrs. Davoren; ‘county people, perhaps. There is that Mr. Cumbermere, for instance, who has an immense estate on the borders of Berkshire. I’ve heard your papa talk of him; quite a young man, and unmarried. Come, Janet, be candid with your poor old mother. Isn’t there one among them all who seems a little in earnest?’

‘Not one among them, mother,’ the girl answered, looking downward with a faint, faint sigh, so faint as to escape even the mother’s ear; ‘not one. They all say the same thing, or the same kind of thing, in just the same way. They think me rather good-looking, I believe, and they seem really to like my singing and playing. But they will go away and forget both, and my good looks as well. There is not one of them ever so little in love with me; and if I were in love with one of them I might almost as well be in love with all, for they are all alike.’

This was discouraging, but the mother still cherished her dream; cherished it until the bitter hour of awakening—that fatal hour in which she learned from a letter in the girl’s own hand that Janet had abandoned home, friends, reputation—the very hope of heaven, as it seemed to the heartbroken father and mother—to follow the fortunes of a villain, of whose identity they had not the faintest idea, whose opportunities for the compassing of this deadly work would seem to have been of the smallest.

The girl’s letter—passionate, despairing, with a wild and deep despair which told how desperate had been the conflict between love and duty—gave no hint of her betrayer’s name or place in the world.

The letter was somewhat vaguely worded. There are some things which no woman could write. Janet Davoren did not tell them that she went of her own free will to perdition. But so much despair could hardly accompany an innocent passion; sorrow so deep and hopeless implied guilt. To the Rector and his wife there seemed no room for doubt. They read and re-read the long wild appeal for forgiveness or oblivion; that their only daughter, the pride and idol of both, might be pardoned or forgotten. They weighed every word, written with a swift impetuous hand, blotted by remorseful tears, but no ray of hope shone between the lines. They could arrive at but one miserable conclusion. The girl had accepted dishonour as the cost of a love she was too weak to renounce. The letter was long, wild, recklessly worded; but in all there was no clue to the traitor.

The Rector and his wife made no outcry. They were even heroic enough to suppress all outward token of their grief, lest their little world should discover the cruel truth. The father went about his daily work pale and shaken, but calm of aspect. The only noticeable fact in his life was that from this day forth he neglected his garden and his poultry-yard. His innocent delight in Dorking fowls and standard rose-trees perished for ever with his daughter’s disappearance. The mother wept in secret, and suffered not so much as a single tear to be seen by her household.

The servants were told that Miss Davoren had gone upon a visit to some friends in London. Janet had left the house in the early morning, unseen by any one except the lad who attended to the garden, and him she had employed to convey a small portmanteau to the railway station. The manner of her departure therefore had been commonplace enough; but the servants were accustomed to hear a good deal of preliminary discussion before any movement of the family, and wondered not a little that there should have been nothing said about Miss Davoren’s departure beforehand, and that she should have gone away so early, before any one was up, and without so much as a cup of tea, as the cook remarked plaintively.

The wretched father and mother read that farewell letter till every word it contained seemed written on their hearts, but it helped them in no manner towards the knowledge of their daughter’s fate. They went over the names in their own little circle; the half-dozen or so of young men—more or less unattractive—who were on visiting terms at the Rectory; but there was no member of Wykhamston society they could for a moment consider guilty: and indeed, the answer to every suspicion was obvious in the fact that every member of that small community was in his place: the curate going his quiet rounds on a hog-maned pony; the unmarried doctor scouring the neighbourhood from breakfast to tea-time in his travel-worn dog-cart; the lawyer’s son true to the articles that bound him to his father’s service; the small landowners and gentlemanly tenant-farmers of the immediate vicinity to be seen as of old at church and market-place. No, there was no one the Rector could suspect of act or part in his darling’s flight.

A little later, and with extreme caution, he ventured to inquire among certain of his parishioners if any stranger had been seen about Wykhamston within the last month or so. He contrived to put this question to a well-to-do corn-chandler, the chief gossip of the little town, in a purely conversational manner.

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Huskings the corn-chandler, assenting to a general remark upon the dulness that had prevailed of late in Wykhamston, ‘the place has been quiet enough. It ain’t much of a place for strangers at the best of times, unless it’s one of them measuring chaps that come spying about, with a yard measure, after a new railway, that’s to take everybody away from the town and never bring nobody to it, and raise the price of meat and vegibles. There was that horgan-playin’ chap at the George the other day; what _he_ come for nobody could find out, for he didn’t measure nothing; only poked about the old church on workadays, and played the horgan. But of course you’d know all about him from Miss Davoren, as must have seen him sometimes when she went to practise with the coheer.’

The Rector’s sad face blanched a little. This was the man!

‘No,’ he said, somewhat falteringly, ‘my daughter never spoke of him; or if she did I didn’t take any notice. She’s away now for a little time, staying with friends in London. She may have told us about him; I don’t remember.’

‘Strange old gentleman, the Rector!’ Mr. Huskings remarked to his wife afterwards; ‘such a nervous way with him lately; breaking fast, I’m afeard.’

‘Miss Davoren could hardly have missed seein’ of him,’ he answered. ‘He were always about the church, when he warn’t fishin’, but he were a great hand at fishin’. Rather a well-looking chap, with dark eyes and long dark hair; looked summat like a furriner, but spoke English plain enough in spite of his furrin looks.’

‘Young?’ asked the Rector.

‘Might be anything betwixt twenty-five and thirty-five.’

‘And a gentleman, I suppose?’

‘His clothes was fust-class, and he paid his way honourable. Had the best rooms over yonder,’ with a jerk of his head in the direction of the George, ‘and tipped everybody ’andsome. He warn’t here above a month or six weeks; but he hired a pianner from Mr. Stammers, up street, and there he’d sit by the hour together, Mrs. Capon told me, strum, strum, strum. “Music that made you feel creepy-crawly like,” says Mrs. Capon; “not a good hearty tune as you could understand, but meandering and meandering like till you felt as if you’d gone to sleep in a cathedral while the organ was playin’,” says Mrs. Capon.’

Music! Yes, that was the spell which had lured his child to her ruin. Nothing less than that fatal magic, which had held her from her babyhood, could have been strong enough to beguile that poor young soul.

‘Did you hear the man’s name?’ asked the Rector.

‘I heerd it, sure enough, sir; but I never were a good hand at remembering names. Mrs. Capon ud tell you in a moment.’

‘No, no,’ exclaimed the Rector nervously; ‘I’ve no curiosity; it’s of no importance. Good-afternoon, Huskings. You—you may send me a sack of barley;’ this with a little pang, remembering what a joyless business his poultry-yard had become of late.

He went ‘up street’ to Mr. Stammers, who kept a little music-shop and let out pianos.

‘You’d better look in at the Rectory and tune the piano before my daughter comes home, Stammers,’ said the Rector, with a bitter pain at his heart, and then sat down in the chair by Mr. Stammers’ door—set wide open on this warm afternoon—a little out of breath, though the High-street from the corn-merchant’s door to the music-seller’s was a dead level.

‘Yes, sir. Miss Davoren away, sir? I thought I missed her at church last Sunday. Mr. Filby’s playing don’t come anything nigh hers. What a wonderful gift she has, sir! The Marchioness was up town yesterday—they are at the Castle for a week, ong parsong—and drew up here to give an order. I made bold to show her the little fantasia I took the liberty to dedicate to Miss Davoren. She smiled so sweet when she saw the name. “You’ve reason to be proud of your Rector’s daughter, Mr. Stammers,” she said; “such a lovely young lady, and such a fine musician! I wish I had time to call at the Rectory.” And then she arst after your ’elth, sir, and your good lady’s, and Miss Davoren’s, quite affable, just before she drove away. She was drivin’ her own ponies.’

‘She was very good,’ said Mr. Davoren absently. O, vain delight in earthly pomp and pride! The notice of these magnates of the land had not saved his child from destruction; nay, perhaps had been, in some unknown manner, the primary cause of her fall.

‘Yes, you had better tune the piano, Stammers,’ he went on, with a feeble sigh. ‘She will like to find it in good tune when she comes back. By the way, you let a piano to the gentleman at the George the other day—Mr.—’

‘Mr. Vandeleur,’ said Stammers briskly. ‘Let him the best piano I have—a brand-new Collard—at thirty shillings a month, bein’, as it was, a short let. And wonderful it was to hear him play upon it, too! I’ve stood on the staircase at the George half an hour at a stretch, listenin’ to him.’

‘A fine musician?’ inquired the Rector, with another sigh. Fatal music, deadly art!

‘Fine isn’t the word, sir. There’s a many fine musicians, as far as pianoforte playing goes,’ with a little conscious air of inward swelling, as of a man who numbered himself among these gifted ones. ‘I don’t think there’s anythink of Mozart’s, or ’Andels, or ’Aydn’s, or Beethoven’s—that’s the king of ’em all, is Beethoven—you could put a name to that I wouldn’t play at sight; but I don’t rank myself with Mr. Vandeleur, the gentleman at the George, for all that.’

‘What is the difference?’

Mr. Stammers tapped his forehead.

‘There, sir; there’s where the difference lies. I ’aven’t ’is ’ead. Not but what I had a taste for music when I was that ’igh,’ indicating the altitude of a foot and a half from the floor, ‘and was took notice of by the gentry of these parts in consequence, my father bein’, as you are aware, sir, a numble carpenter. But I ’aven’t the ’ead that man ’as. To hear him ’andle Beethoven, sir, the Sonater Pathetick, or the “Moonlight,” wonderful! And not that alone. There was sonaters and fugues he played, sir—whether they was his own composition or wasn’t, I can’t say; but they were fugues and sonaters I never heard before, and I don’t believe mortal man ever wrote ’em. They outraged all the laws of ’armony, sir. Why, there was consecutive fifths in ’em as thick as gooseberries, and yet they was as fine as anythink in Mozart. Such music! It turned one’s blood cold to hear him. If you could fancy the old gentleman playing the piano—which, bein’ a clergyman, of course you wouldn’t give your mind to—you could fancy him playing like that.’

‘An eccentric style?’ inquired the Rector.

‘Eccentric! It was the topsy-turviest kind of thing I ever heard in my life. Yet if that man was to play in public, he’d take the town by storm; they’d run after him like mad.’

‘Do you think he is a professional performer?’

‘Hardly; he hadn’t the professional way with him. I’ve seen plenty of the profession, havin’ managed for all the concerts that have been given in Wykhamston for the last twenty years. No; and a professional wouldn’t dawdle away close upon six weeks in a small country town such as this. No; what I take him for is a wealthy amateur—a gentleman that had been living a little too fast up in London, and come down here to freshen himself up a bit with country air and quiet.’

‘How did he spend his time?’

‘In the church, a good bit of it, playing the organ. He used to get the keys from old Bopolt, the clerk. I wonder you didn’t hear of it, sir.’

‘No,’ said the Rector, ‘they told me nothing.’ This with a sigh so deep, so near akin to a groan, that it smote the heart of the lively Stammers.

‘I’m afraid you’re tired, sir, this ’ot day—tryin’ weather—so changeable; the thermumitor has gone up to eighty-one, Farren’s heat. Can I get you a glass of water, sir, with a dash of somethink, if I might take the liberty?’

‘Thank you, Stammers; no, it’s nothing. I’ve been a little worried lately. Bopolt had no business to admit any one into the church habitually.’

‘I daresay Mr. Vandeleur made it worth his while, sir. He was quite a gentleman, I assure you. And it wasn’t as if you was in the ’abit of keepin’ the sacramential plate in the vestry.’

‘There are other things that a man can steal,’ said the Rector moodily; ‘more precious things than paten or chalice. But no matter. I don’t suppose Bopolt meant any harm, only—only he might have told me. Good-afternoon, Mr. Stammers.’

‘Do you feel yourself strong enough for the walk ’ome, sir? You look rather pale—overcome by the ’eat.’

‘Yes, yes; quite strong. Good-afternoon;’ and Stephen Davoren plodded his way down the shadeless High-street till he came to a little court leading to the church; Wykhamston Church being, for some reason or other, hidden away at the back of the High-street, as though it were an unsightly thing, and only approachable by courts and alleys.

Old John Bopolt, the parish clerk, quavering and decrepit after the manner of rural clerks, had his habitation in the court which made the isthmus of communication between the High-street and the churchyard. He rose hastily from his tea-table at sight of his Rector, and made a little old-world bow, while Mrs. Bopolt and Mrs. Bopolt’s married daughter, and the married daughter’s Betsy Jane, an unkempt girl of fourteen or so, huddled together with a respectful and awestricken air before that dignitary.

‘Bopolt,’ said the Rector, in a sterner tone than he was wont to use, ‘what right had you to allow the church to be made a lounging-place for idle strangers?’

‘A lounging-place, sir! I never did any such-like thing. There was no lounging went on, to my knowledge; but I’ve been in the habit of showing the monniments occasionally, as you know, sir, to any respectable stranger, and the rose winder over the south door.’

‘Showing the monuments; yes, that’s one thing. But to let a stranger have the key habitually—’

‘Meanin’ the gentleman at the George, sir,’ faltered the clerk, with an embarrassed air. ‘He was quite the gentleman; and Mr. Filby, the organist, sir, knew as he was in the ’abit of playin’ the organ for a ’our or so, and left the keys for him regular, did Mr. Filby, and says to me, “John, whenever Mr. Vandeleur at the George likes to play the organ, he’s free and welcome, and you can tell him so, with my respects.”’

‘He bribed you, I suppose?’ said Mr. Davoren.

‘He may have given me a trifle at odd times as some recompensation for my trouble in opening the door for him, sir. I don’t wish to deceive you; and if I’d thought for a moment there was any harm, I’d have cut my fingers off sooner than open the churchdoor for him. But I made certain as you knew, sir, more particularly as I’d seen Miss Davoren go into the church more than once when Mr. Vandeleur was there.’

‘Of course,’ said the Rector, without flinching, ‘she had her choir work to attend to. Well, John, there’s no use in being angry about a mistake; only remember the church is not a place for the amusement of amateur musicians. Good-afternoon.’

The family, who had looked on in unspeakable awe during this brief dialogue, now began to breathe freely again, and a kettle, which had been sputtering destruction over Mrs. Bopolt’s bright fender unregarded, was now snatched off the top bar by that careful matron, who had not dared to move hand or foot in the presence of an offended Rector.

Stephen Davoren walked slowly homeward, a little more sick at heart than when he began his voyage of discovery. Other people had known the seducer; other people had seen his daughter go into the church to meet her tempter, polluting that sacred place by the conflict of an earthly passion. Other people had guessed something of the dreadful truth, perhaps. He only had been blind.

The thought of this, that his little world might be in the secret of his sad story, helped to break his heart. If it had not been broken by the mere fact of his daughter’s ruin, it would have been crushed by the weight of his own shame. He could not look the world in the face any more. He tried to do his duty manfully, preached the old sound homely sermons; but when he spoke of sin and sorrow, he seemed to speak of his lost daughter. He went among his poor, but the thought of Janet set his wits wandering in the midst of his simple talk, and he would make little feeble speeches, and repeat himself helplessly, hardly knowing what he said.

His parishioners perceived the change, and told each other that the Rector was breaking fast; it was a pity Miss Davoren was away: ‘She’d have cheered him up a bit, poor old gentleman.’

Lucius came home from Winchester later in the year—his school course ended, and the winner of a scholarship which would help him at the university—came home to hear the story of his sister’s flight, his Janet, the sister whose genius and beauty had been his highest pride.

He took the news of this calamity more quietly than his father and mother had dared to hope; insisted upon hearing every detail of the event, but said little.

‘You made inquiries about this man, this Mr. Vandeleur, of course, father?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ answered the Rector in his despondent way, ‘I wrote to Harwood—you remember my old friend Harwood, the solicitor?—and set him to work, not telling him the whole story, as you may suppose. But it resulted in nothing. I put an advertisement into the _Times_, too, imploring your sister—’ with a little husky noise before the word, as if he would fain have uttered his missing girl’s name but could not, ‘imploring her to come back, offering forgiveness, affection, silence, so worded that none but she could understand. I think she must have left England, Lucius. I do not believe she would have left that appeal unanswered.’

‘Vandeleur!’ said Lucius quietly; ‘an assumed name, no doubt. Some scoundrel she met at the Castle, or at Lady Baker’s. Vandeleur, I pray God I may come across him before I’m many years older.’

This was all he said, and from this time forth he never pronounced his sister’s name. He saw how far this grief had gone towards shortening his father’s life, how dark a cloud it had spread over his mother’s declining years. A twelvemonth later, and both were gone; the father dying suddenly one bright spring morning of heart-disease, organic disorder of long standing, but who shall say how accelerated by that bitter trouble? The faithful wife drooped from the day of her husband’s death, and only four months afterwards sank quietly to her rest, thankful that her journey was ended, placidly happy in the secure hope of a swift and easy passage to the better land, where she would find the partner of her life waiting for her, the little daughter who died years ago greeting her with loving welcome.

And thus Lucius Davoren had been left quite alone in the world in the first year of his university life, two years before he came up to London to walk the hospitals, and just five years before he started for America with Geoffrey Hossack.